This post is part of the Windows 10 blog series in which I will look at a number of new functionalities in Windows 10 as well as new functionality in PowerShell 5.0. In every article I will highlight a specific cmdlet or technology and provide additional information about the cmdlet
The recently introduced Get-WindowsUpdateLog cmdlet merges the Windows Update logs that are stored in ETL files together into a single plain text log file. The following command can be used to convert these log to a log file:
1 | Get-WindowsUpdateLog -LogPath $env:temp\UpdateLog.log |
Unfortunately the output from this cmdlet is send directly to the host, so it is not possible to store this information in a variable or to interact with it in a meaningful way. I hope this will be corrected before release as it makes it a bit cumbersome to interact with this cmdlet.
The cmdlet works by a three steps process:
- Read Information from the .etl files
- Convert to intermediate format, either CSV or XML
- Convert the intermediate to text and output to the specified logpath
To view the information stored in the intermediate file, which is in a nice structured format the following code can be used:
1 | Import-Csv -Path C:\Users\JAAPBR~1\...\wuetl.CSV.tmp.00000 |
The converted log is available in the specified path, to open the log file in the default text editor, usually notepad, the Invoke-Item can be used:
1 | Invoke-Item -Path $env:temp\UpdateLog.log |
Get-WindowsUpdateLog |
Get-WindowsUpdateLog |